Is Spring Cleaning All It’s Cracked Up to Be? One Fashion Writer Debunks the Myths

If you live in a 500-square-foot apartment and your chief thrill in life is buying things, here is what will eventually happen: Your peanut-sized bedroom closet, exploding with tulle smocks and frocks in a way that you always thought was so charming, will threaten to turn into a tutu tsunami ready to crush you while you sleep. (“It looks like a retired showgirl’s boudoir!”—a colleague once declared with what one hoped was admiration.) The 1930s kitchen table overflowing with stacks of papers—because you're a writer!—will be five minutes away from turning, like the week-old milk in that big white thing in the kitchen that also stores books, into something decidedly sour.

Every year at this time, as the spring sun streams through the leaky windows of my unrenovated 1920s palace, I tell myself there is no shame in getting a storage space. Everyone has a storage space! Anecdotal tales have reached my ears describing the fun atmosphere at Manhattan Mini Storage in Chelsea, where one fellow is rumored to have created a purple-carpeted party space crammed with disco balls and 45-RPM records.

But I suspect the truth is that once my back-season Comme des Garçons ensembles and run-down Repettos are locked up in storage-prison, I will never get a day-pass to visit them. I will send checks to their jailer every month, and then I will move on, buying more things, never giving their poor incarcerated selves another thought.

As if my constant clothes-shopping isn’t enough (the inimitable Mickey Boardman once likened my buying habits to a faucet that is never entirely shut off), my dilemma is further complicated by the fact that I also collect shabby antique dolls and stuffed animals, which means that there are hundreds! thousands? of elephants and clowns, baby dolls and bears staring at you when you sit on the feather-spewing paisley-covered divan. Some people can’t eat anything that has a face—in my case I can’t seem to throw out anything that has eyes and a mouth. (The designer Joseph Altuzarra, a very polite person who was clearly at a loss when confronted with this very peculiar notion of home decorating, hemmed and hawed and then said, “It’s very . . . French.”)

In desperate need of professional help, I pick up The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo, the runaway best-seller that has taken the messy-home world by a storm. The author says that your hard-working socks should be laid reverently in your drawers, and gently suggests that some of your T-shirts are as sick of you as you are of them. Kondo recommends that you rip through your condo, holding up every roll of paper towels, every Q-tip, every rusty can of bug spray, every pair of winter emergency mittens, every salt-stained Ugg pressed into service on the most disgusting day of the year, and ask yourself “Does it spark joy?” If the answer is no, then you must unceremoniously give it the dump.

I have two problems with this method: 1. Some things are not exactly meant to spark joy, they are only meant to line trash bins and 2. Even for items with whom you have a shaky relationship, how do you know that they will never spark joy again? You liked them once! Maybe you are just going through a rough patch! Do you get rid of your friends just because they annoy you sometimes?

So lately I have been considering employing the Box Butler—a service that drops off boxes for you to fill up, and then when you’re ready, sends some guys over to cart them away. Your things go to some stern boarding school that doesn’t allow visitors—if and when you wish to see them again you just tell the Box Butler and he (she?) will bring them back.

But will I be able to ignore the silent sobbing of Yohji coats and faded Fendi satchels, shut up in boxes and then handed over to a couple of strange men? Don’t think of it as exile, I will tell them! You’re going on vacation! But who knows—I wouldn’t be the least surprised if those ancient Romeo Gigli cardis, those moth-eaten monkeys, manage to commandeer the Box Butler truck and drive right back to my house.